This page was created by Julie Yue. The last update was by Caroline Frank.
Encountering China
Britain's East India Company [EIC] commanded over half of world trade during the eighteenth century. The EIC was a private company, but one that commanded a fleet of armed ships and even private armies. Force of arms and shows of power allowed the EIC to get its way with brute strength. Learning the languages of the territories where the Company traded was not necessary to reap a profit. In China for much of that century the EIC saw “only limited utility in learning the language,” and by 1790 it had become openly averse to the training of employees as Chinese interpreters.[14] In India as well, the Company exhibited little interest in local languages until Warren Hastings became Governor-General of Bengal in 1773. Hastings was one of the first to see the limits of power based on brute strength, and he promoted interest, albeit paternalistically, in studying Indian languages and culture.[15] Hastings suffered the embarrassment of impeachment forcing him to leave India in 1788 to defend himself in London. Though he was acquitted after nearly a decade of conflict, his removal from India left to others the promotion of Indian culture and language among EIC employees.
EIC authorities in China had occasionally had the benefit of officials who knew Chinese. In 1736 it happened that James Flint, a teenager, was left in Canton after travelling there on an EIC ship. Flint studied Chinese on his own, and with a self-propelled start, then persuaded his superiors to pay for additional instruction. This led to Flint’s appointment as the Company’s official interpreter. Flint and his compatriots felt the EIC needed to expand its trading privileges beyond Canton, where for centuries Sino- European commerce had been concentrated. Expeditions to negotiate with officials in Ningpo and other northern cities had occurred in 1755-57. The travels of Flint’s delegation offended the regional authorities in Canton, who imagined these initiatives would end up reducing their power and and their trade. Complaints from officials in both Ningpo and Canton led the Emperor to restrict by law all European trade to Canton.
Flint continued, however, to press Qing officials, next complaining that he had been cheated in a transaction with officials in Canton. The complaint reached the Emperor, in spite of established practices prohibiting direct communication between commoner and emperor. Singled out for the most severe punishment were the Chinese who had assisted in translating Flint’s complaint, both of these men were executed. And subsequently the teaching of Chinese to foreigners became a capital crime. Flint was imprisoned for three years and deported.[16]
Though learning Chinese had not been a problem for the Christian missionaries, who had been working in China since the sixteenth century, the denouement of the “Flint Affair” cast a shadow for decades. Britain’s Macartney mission, mounted in 1794, lacked experienced translators, and this is often cited as a cause of its failure. In 1798 another Chinese speaker did join the EIC staff, but he remained rare within the Anglo-speaking community.
When American ships began to arrive in Canton in 1795, their business was transacted through "linguists," a monopolistic guild engaged by the hongs and foreign traders for their fluency in China coast pidgin, an amalgam of Chinese, Portuguese, and English. The linguists command of foreign languages was otherwise limited. Importantly these officials acted as mediators as much as translators.[17] The measure of their success was smooth running trade, not necessarily accurate translation.
In spite of the language teaching prohibition, traders still needed to communicate. The Chinese elements in China Coast pidgin offered one linguistic bridge; and in many ways it was good enough for all practical purposes, a spoken language used in everyday business. The sounds could be alphabetized and even transliterated to Chinese. Official interactions could be left to the government appointed linguists . Still the Chinese written language evinced such a separate world that it inspired curiosity. In the effects of the young Benjamin Page aboard the Ann & Hope (the elder was captain, the younger, well, he was a page) there was a counting chart with numerals and Chinese characters with the sounds they represented. Further indication of curiosity in the language comes from the legacy of Samuel Ward, Jr. who was supercargo aboard the General Washington when she went to Canton; he bequeathed to Brown University a book, 漢字西譯終, a partially completed Latin-Chinese dictionary.
When Benjamin Carter arrived in Canton in December 1798, he seemed entirely focused on recording every transaction of trade. The journal he kept reveals precious little of what he saw, or what he thought about Chinese society. A letter written after his return to Providence simply observes: “I was much pleased with Canton. The Chinese as to their manners, customs, laws, religion & language are so different from us that they constitute a separate world by themselves…”[18]
Perhaps it was Carter’s curiosity about this “separate world” that triggered his fascination with studying Chinese. Fragments from his personal papers show the laboring strokes of a novice learner seeking to master the composition of Chinese characters. The months of long journeys back and forth to China would have been ideal times to practice his calligraphy.
Many years later he recalled: “When I paid some attention to the [Chinese] language a few years ago I considered it as more an object of curiosity than utility as a very interesting language forming a part of general inquiry on which the busy mind of man for his own amusement & recreation might spend a few months of leisure if he chose.”[19]
Since an early age Carter had studied language. In his day, boys with college ambitions needed to study Latin and Greek, as they were expected to recite lessons in these “learned languages”to qualify for admission.[20] Studies at Brown (then Rhode Island College) where he enrolled at the tender age of eleven, continued with courses in Latin and Greek.[21] Graduation ceremonies until 1786 included colloquies in Latin, a practice ceased then only because there was a shortage of time.
So, what we today call the classical languages, were part and parcel of the expectations of the learned man circa 1800. Such learning was not necessarily for practical reasons. These languages were regarded as vehicles for moral and intellectual training. Be that as it may, in Carter’s world travels, this knowledge proved useful. Latin allowed negotiations in Amsterdam, intellectual conversations in Leiden and Greek opened trading connections in St Petersburg.[22] Such knowledge signaled elite origins, smoothing the way to connections around the world; but Benjamin Carter’s interest in language learning went beyond its utility in entering college or its framing of a moral life. That he had a deep and abiding interest in language itself, is documented in the archives that trace his life: jottings not only in Chinese, but also in Hebrew, and Arabic, letters to friends composed in Latin, and recordings in his “Ann & Hope” journal of Australian aboriginal words, the first time so recorded in English. Linguistic curiosity characterized Carter’s worldview.
____________________
[14] Sean Golden, “From the Society of Jesus to the East India Company: A Case Study in the Social History of Translation”, in Beyond the Western Tradition, Translation Perspectives XI, ed. M. G. Rose, 199-213.
[15] Notably, Hastings is often quoted “"Every application of knowledge and especially such as is obtained in social communication with people, over whom we exercise dominion, founded on the right of conquest, is useful to the state ... It attracts and conciliates distant affections, it lessens the weight of the chain by which the natives are held in subjection and it imprints on the hearts of our countrymen the sense of obligation and benevolence... Every instance which brings their real character will impress us with more generous sense of feeling for their natural rights, and teach us to estimate them by the measure of our own... But such instances can only be gained in their writings; and these will survive when British domination in India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance.”
[16] Golden, 210; and Susan Reed Stifler, "The Language Students of the East India Company's Canton Factory", Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 69 (1938), 46-82.
[17] Van Dyke
[18] Benjamin Bowen Carter, letter to unknown, July 4, 1799, folder 1, box 1, Carter-Danforth Papers, Rhode Island Historical Society Library (Providence, Rhode Island).
[19] Benjamin Bowen Carter, letter to Edward Carrington, July 17, 1828, folder 3, box 1, Carter-Danforth Papers, Rhode Island Historical Society Library (Providence, Rhode Island).
[20] By contemporary standards this is extraordinary, in 1780 however, enrollment in college for 13-year-olds was the convention. Bronson, Walter, The History of Brown University, 1764-1914, Providence: Brown University, 1914
[21] Kenny, 101.
